“Then you should be smart enough to find another job,” I snap.
He laughs, but his laugh is one of those silent ones. “Yeah, if my mom was a billionaire I’d probably feel that way, too. You know what the unemployment rate is for guys my age?”
I don’t. I have the feeling he does.
“I don’t have any money,” I say.
“Well, that’s just a matter of time,” he says. “Maddox had the money, didn’t he? Which means he got it from you. Right? Girlfriend here doesn’t have it, so it came from you.” He shrugs and leans back. “Go get some more. Twelve large to Terra Spiker is like a quarter to me.” He digs change out of his tight jeans, finds a quarter, holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “That’s what twelve grand is to your mom.”
“My mother has—” I begin.
“But you know what twelve grand is to Maddox? It’s life, that’s what it is. Life itself.”
The strange thing is that his dark eyes aren’t cold or without feeling. He seems compassionate. Almost as if he cares.
Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill Maddox.
Answering my silent question, he says, “I hate to see things end that way. You know how I’d like things to end? You meet me tonight—I’ll text you the location—and you hand me a bag with thirteen thousand dollars in it.”
“It was twelve!”
“Our interest rates compound hourly. By tonight it’ll be thirteen.”
He starts to walk away and I yell, “You don’t even have my number.”
“Sure I do,” he says without looking back.
Aislin doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. The nameless guy with the quarter has taken care of that.
“How am I supposed to…” I begin.
“Don’t,” Aislin says. She puts her hand on my forearm. “You know what? Don’t even. You’ve done more than enough. Too much. Really. This isn’t your problem.”
“You’re my best friend. Of course it’s my problem.”
She looks at me gratefully, but then her gaze shifts. She rises without a word. There’s a doctor in line at the cash register, holding a piece of pie.
I follow her to him.
“You’re the doctor who took care of Maddox,” she says, yanking on his sleeve. “What’s happening?”
He looks cornered and not happy about it. “He’s still in the OR. It’s going to be a while. Hours.”
“Hours?” I echo.
“He took two bullets. There are fragments in his spine, damage to his liver, and major internal bleeding. If he survives all that, his large intestine is perforated, which means that all kinds of bacteria have been released into his body.”
“But he’s going to live,” Aislin says.
The doctor says, “He may.”
He may?
I look at Aislin, expecting a breakdown. Her face is almost impassive. But her eyes, they tell me the truth.
The truth shocks me. It shouldn’t, maybe, but it does. Her reaction to those two terrifying words, words conveying the possibility—no, the likelihood—that Maddox will die, causes a gleam.
It’s gone in a heartbeat. But I know I saw it.
There’s a part of Aislin that wishes Maddox would just, finally, die and free her.
Strange, maybe, but that decides it for me. I’ll get the money. Because my best friend is not going to live the rest of her life feeling like she dumped her boyfriend when he was helpless.
Maddox is going to live, if I have anything to say about it.
Then
she can dump the jerk.
– 38 –
SOLO
I walk the streets of San Francisco with doom in my pocket, a heavy dread in my heart, and a longing to be back at Spiker delivering bagels.
Tommy will come looking for me. I’m sure of that. I knocked him off his stride, and by escaping I’ve probably frustrated him to the point of throwing furniture.
But he can’t find me. So for now I’m safe.
Will he guess that I have the deadly information with me? Will he guess that I’ve hesitated to disseminate it?
What’s his play? Run to Terra, no doubt. Warn her that their little creep show is over.
Why doesn’t the idea of that scene make me happy? Oh, I know why: Eve. Eve has screwed everything up. Eve has messed me up. She’s scrambled my brain. She’s totally confused me.
Which is why I have to see her. To un-confuse myself.
Probably if I tried to re-create that kiss now it would have no effect on me. No bad effect, by which I mean no good effect, as in it would probably have no effect on me at all.
This is a confusing train of thought.
Probably I won’t have a completely clear head until I test out the proposition. The one about a second kiss meaning nothing to me at all. At all.
I decide to kick a bag of trash on the sidewalk.
Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, I have to go see her, see what she’s up to, see what she thinks I should do. Get her permission. Yes, her permission, no, I don’t mean that. Because she is not the boss of me.
I remember when I walked in behind her and she was working on that sim—no not a sim, was it—but that’s later knowledge and what I’m really remembering is the way her hair was kind of swept aside and it was with great difficulty that I did not walk over and kiss the back of her neck.
At which point, she no doubt would have turned around and punched me.
Or not.
I walk faster. It’s downhill, so I can make good time. Is it possible she hasn’t realized that I left with the drive? No, no way. Dammit.
Why did I?
Because I was scared. And I am never scared.
The Embarcadero is in view. Traffic is starting to pick up. The trolleys go shrieking past. There are a pair of old gay dudes walking hand-in-hand with a tiny dog on a leash. There’s a street guy checking the trash for cans. There’s a business chick in a gray skirt suit and sneakers. I wonder if she’s the lawyer whose office I misappropriated.
I push through a mini-crowd of commuters and march purposefully toward the pier warehouse, where I will grab Eve and kiss the living hell out of her. No. First I’ll ask her whether I should or should not destroy her mother and her family business.
I stop at the edge of the pier. Something is wrong. I feel it. So I stop.
And it’s too late. Because there are two guys behind me, standing way too close.
“We have guns!”
I turn to look at them. It’s Dr. Chen and Dr. Anapura. Big Brains. Chen is in his forties. He has a chronically startled look behind glasses he thinks make him look hip. Anapura is a woman about fifteen years older than I am. She has a long braid down her back that nearly touches her … well, it’s really long.
“You guys absolutely do not have guns,” I say.
Chen points meaningfully and nervously to a bulge beneath his jacket.
Anapura pulls something from her coat pocket that looks like a can of hair spray. It’s not.
She hoses me with it, I say something brilliant like, “Hey!” and then the world goes swirly.
* * *
I can’t say that I expect to wake up anywhere in particular. But where I do wake up is not in the pier warehouse.
The mildew smell is gone. So is the sound of water sloshing against the pilings. There’s something in the taste of the air that’s familiar.
I’m back at Spiker.
Strong hands grab me. There’s a hood over my head. I’m being hauled up to my feet and pushed forward. They’ve taken my shoes. My bare feet are on carpeting. My hands are tied behind me. I sense that there are at least three or four people around me.
We go through a door.
“Wha—” I start to say, and only then does my befuddled mind realize there’s a piece of duct tape over my mouth.
More doors. An elevator.
We’re going down.
Out of the elevator, through a locked door—I hear them keying the combination—and then we’re on another elevator. Going down again.
Going down to where? There is nothing this far down. I know the Spiker campus like I know my own face. There is no second set of elevators. There is no sub-basement.
And yet there is.
The elevator stops and I am shoved out. I stumble. I smack into something hard and unyielding, like a wall, only not. I feel it as it slides past my cheek: a steel support column.
The hood is snatched from my head.
The light is dim, ancient fluorescent cylinders way up high, hanging from unfinished concrete. We’re in a large space, the size of a high school gym. Tanks of various shapes and sizes are everywhere. Tall cylinders, horizontal cylinders, giant steel-bolted aquariums.
There are objects, creatures, in many but not all of these tanks. Nearest to me, most visible, is something that must once have been a gorilla. It’s been shaved, or worse yet, deliberately designed to be hairless. It looks like a wrinkled, sagging, old bodybuilder with skin the color of licorice. It’s not alive, at least I hope it isn’t, because it’s jammed tightly into the vertical cylinder.
I count four men and one woman. Dr. Chen, Dr. Gold, Martinez, a grad student working on his PhD, and a guy named Sullivan, who works in accounting. Dr. Anapura is the only woman.
The missing person, the sixth, is standing behind me.
“Solo Plissken,” Tattooed Tommy says, a regretful tone in his voice.
I size up the people facing me. Chen and Anapura are the tough ones. The rest are scared and unsure of themselves.
“Plissken?” Martinez echoes. “As in…?”
“You didn’t know that?” Tommy said. “You are missing out on the good gossip, dude.” He moves around to a spot where I can see him. “Yes, Plissken, ‘as in.’ Dr. Jeffrey Plissken and his lovely wife, Isabel. As in what, three major, groundbreaking, Nobel-bait papers?”
I glare at Tommy. He rips the tape from my mouth.
“Leave my parents out of this,” I say with my first breath.
“He’s a gofer,” Martinez protests. “He runs things through the autoclave.”
Tommy looks at me, as if it’s my job to explain.
“He’s actually quite bright, it turns out,” Tommy says. “His parents had, what, an average IQ in the 170 range? There’s been some reversion to the mean, of course, so I don’t believe bagel boy is quite in that league, but oh, he’s smart. Aren’t you, Solo?”
He leans close, cocky. He’s enjoying performing for his crew. I jerk my head forward hard, a head butt.
I miss. But I make him jump back.
It’s not enough to ruin his triumphant mood.
“How did you find me?” I demand.
“Well, Solo, you come with a few interesting modifications. I assume you know that you were given the same potential to heal as your little girlfriend.”
Of course I know.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say. Which is a stupid and dorky thing to insist on.
“You haven’t tapped that little piece yet? She’s no great beauty, but she’s cute enough, and she’s got a nice little body.”
“I’d do her,” Dr. Chen says.
Dr. Anapura says, “There’s no need to be sexist, Doctor.”
Tommy is irritated, but he continues. “My guys weren’t that far behind you. Clever, losing them in the fog, but they found where you’d docked. They caught a glimpse of you heading east on the Embarcadero. I know the location of Austin Spiker’s studio. Two plus two. Give me some credit.”
“But you don’t have Eve,” I say.
“Mmm. Not yet. She’d been there but she’s gone. For her own safety we need to find her. So tell me. Where?”
“Will it bother you very much if I say, ‘screw you’?”
He grins. “Kind of expected it. It’s okay. We have your flash drive. And in a few hours we’ll have you doing whatever we like, including getting the girl.”
“You going to beat me?”
“No. We’re going to clone you. Going to make ourselves a whole new Solo. Thanks to the Plissken process, we can transfer—and edit—your memories for implantation in the clone. He’ll tell us.”
“The Plissken process. I’m honored.”
“Oh, it’s not named for you, bagel boy. It’s named for the geniuses who invented it, along with the accelerated cloning process itself.”
He lets it sink in. His eyes are bright with anticipation.
I blink and look away. I don’t mean to.
“Yes, young Plissken, that’s right. That’s the truth of it. Terra Spiker? She’s an A-plus businesswoman, but only a B-minus scientist. Your parents were the brains behind Spiker-Plissken Bio. As it was supposed to be known.” He clucks his tongue. “Your parents would be so disappointed in you. They knew to put science ahead of anything. They knew society’s restrictions are meaningless.”
The others nod heartily. True believers. Acolytes.
Acolytes, not of Terra Spiker, but of my own parents.
“They also knew the profit potential of that kind of power,” Tommy says. “My God, you can’t even begin to imagine it. With their work—and of course the interface designed by their former grad student—we can create humans to order. Do you know what people will pay for that? I mean: O … M … G, Solo! We can create humans from scratch. We can make exact replicas. Or we can let you design your own and make it any age you want, program it any way you want. For a price, you can be God.”
“And we could banish all hatred and evil and genetic disease,” Dr. Chen adds.
Tommy waves a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, save the world and all that. And make billions of dollars.”
“Make the world a better place,” Dr. Anapura chimes in.
“Right, whatever, let it go, would you?” Tommy says with a sigh.
I hear Tommy. I know what he’s saying. But I can’t move past what he’s said about my own parents.
“My parents,” I say, having no completion for that sentence.
“They were brilliant! They were young gods,” Tommy says. “Terra found out what they were doing, that they were moving beyond mere theory, and she shut them down. She destroyed their work! She wiped their hard drives, burned their papers.”
“Terra destroyed their work,” I repeat.
Tommy throws his hands in the air. “It was a crime! And then of course, she sent Austin after them. And we know how that ended.”
I shake my head. No. I don’t know how that ended.
He’s starting to tell me when Dr. Gold, who’s wandered off to find something to clean his glasses with, yells from just out of sight. “Hey, Dr. Holyfield! Where’s the girl’s boy?”
Tommy stares at me, frozen. I stare back, just as frozen.